The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

your friends’? You don’t have any friends.” She noticed Lettie Hempstock, then. “Who’s this?”
    “My friend,” I told her. “Where’s the horrible monster?”
    “Don’t call her that,” said my sister. “She’s nice . She’s having a lie-down.”
    My sister did not say anything about my strange clothes.
    Lettie Hempstock took a broken xylophone from her shopping bag and dropped it onto the scree of toys that had accumulated between the piano and the blue toy-box with the detached lid.
    “There,” she said. “Now it’s time to go and say hello.”
    The first faint stirrings of fear inside my chest, inside my mind. “Go up to her room, you mean?”
    “Yup.”
    “What’s she doing up there?”
    “Doing things to people’s lives,” said Lettie. “Only local people so far. She finds what they think they need and she tries to give it to them. She’s doing it to make the world into something she’ll be happier in. Somewhere more comfortable for her. Somewhere cleaner. And she doesn’t care so much about giving them money, not anymore. Now what she cares about more is people hurting.”
    As we went up the stairs Lettie placed something on each step: a clear glass marble with a twist of green inside it; one of the little metal objects we called knucklebones; a bead; a pair of bright blue doll’s eyes, connected at the back with white plastic, to make them open or close; a small red and white horseshoe magnet; a black pebble; a badge, the kind that came attached to birthday cards, with I Am Seven on it; a book of matches; a plastic ladybird with a black magnet in the base; a toy car, half-squashed, its wheels gone; and, last of all, a lead soldier. It was missing a leg.
    We were at the top of the stairs. The bedroom door was closed. Lettie said, “She won’t put you in the attic.” Then, without knocking, she opened the door, and she went into the bedroom that had once been mine and, reluctantly, I followed.
    Ursula Monkton was lying on the bed with her eyes closed. She was the first adult woman who was not my mother that I had seen naked, and I glanced at her curiously. But the room was more interesting to me than she was.
    It was my old bedroom, but it wasn’t. Not anymore. There was the little yellow handbasin, just my size, and the walls were still robin’s-egg blue, as they had been when it was mine. But now strips of cloth hung from the ceiling, gray, ragged cloth strips, like bandages, some only a foot long, others dangling almost all the way to the floor. The window was open and the wind rustled and pushed them, so they swayed, grayly, and it seemed as if perhaps the room was moving, like a tent or a ship at sea.
    “You have to go now,” said Lettie.
    Ursula Monkton sat up on the bed, and then she opened her eyes, which were now the same gray as the hanging cloths. She said, in a voice that still sounded half-asleep, “I wondered what I would have to do to bring you both here, and look, you came.”
    “You didn’t bring us here,” Lettie said. “We came because we wanted to. And I came to give you one last chance to go.”
    “I’m not going anywhere,” said Ursula Monkton, and she sounded petulant, like a very small child who wanted something. “I’ve only just got here. I have a house, now. I have pets—his father is just the sweetest thing. I’m making people happy. There is nothing like me anywhere in this whole world. I was looking, just now when you came in. I’m the only one there is. They can’t defend themselves. They don’t know how. So this is the best place in the whole of creation.”
    She smiled at us both, brightly. She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identity to her for the asking, as my father did.
    “You think this world’s like that,” said Lettie. “You think it’s easy. But it en’t.”
    “Of course it is. What are you saying? That you and your family will defend this world against me? You’re the only one who ever leaves the borders of your farm—and you tried to bind me without knowing my name. Your mother wouldn’t have been that foolish. I’m not scared of you, little girl.”
    Lettie reached deep into the shopping bag. She pulled out the jam jar with the translucent wormhole inside, and held it out.
    “Here’s your way back,”